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Don't let the cloud obscure good judgment

While new and largely untested, cloud storage is likely to become a significant part of your data storage infrastructure. Everything is "cloudy" these days. Hardly a day goes by without yet another player jumping on the cloud bandwagon. Some are legitimately tied to the cloud concept, but others are "cloud washing" or force-fitting their products to the cloud concept because they think if they don't they'll fall out of favor with IT users. However, the questions I'm asked most by IT users are usually on the order of the following: Our central IT supports several divisions, each of which also has its own IT. One division decided to make a deal with Amazon Web Services and transferred some data to S3 storage. Managers in another division have done deals with Nirvanix or Rackspace or AT&T Synaptic, and sent company data to them. What should we do? We don't want to suppress innovation, but we feel like we're losing control. and . . . Our storage vendor is asking us to create a private cloud using mostly the same products as before ...